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Margaret Elaine Hamilton (born Heafield on August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term "software engineering".

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.

Early life and education
Margaret Elaine Heafield was born August 17, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (née Partington). The family later moved to Michigan, where Margaret graduated from Hancock High School in 1954. She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, where her mother was a student; she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She cites Florence Long, the head of the math department at Earlham, as helping with her desire to pursue abstract mathematics and become a mathematics professor. She says her poet father and headmaster grandfather inspired her to include a minor in philosophy in her studies.